Oatmeal

This morning I made oatmeal for myself, Hope and Logan for breakfast. I don't make it very often. As I was standing there stirring it, watching it bubble and thicken, I had a flashback of my grandma Elizabeth. She is my maternal Great Grandmother. She is the mother of my mother's father. She lives with my step Great Grandfather in my home town. I ask about her occasionally. I am told she is okay. Her health has been failing for several years though. She was old when I was born. In my eyes she is ancient now, and I do not mean that in a bad way. Being ancient is highly respectable.

When I was born she insisted my mother name me Gwendolyn Elizabeth, which my mother did not. She brought us food all the time when we were little as she suspected we were nearly starving, sometimes we were sometimes we weren't. She brought us things canned from her garden and meat she bought in bulk from the butcher. She always brought us homemade jelly and jam. I loved her for it and never really understood what a gift that really was until now.

She always wanted my brother and me to stay the night with her and she would feed us lots of hard candy and homemade cake and pie. For breakfast she made us oatmeal. More mornings of my life were spent eating boiling hot oatmeal with brown sugar on top, swinging around in her swivel bar stool chairs at her counter top, than I can count. She took us shopping and showed us off to her neighbors. She took us berry picking. She made the best blackberry cobbler. She made me a German Chocolate cake every single year for my birthday no matter what anyone else was doing. She was always giving us money.

She was already retired by the time I was born but she was one of the hardest working women I ever met. She kept her house sparkling, and everyone elses too. She took care of her own garden and her own lawn. Money was always very important to her and she always encouraged me to save all mine. In fact, she saved spare change for me in a savings account from the time I was a toddler and it grew into enough money when I was sixteen years old to pay for nearly half of my near perfect condition powder blue 1979 Chevy Impala. I immediately wrecked it several times. Each time I would grow to understand more and more of the value of my money as I had to work and pay for every repair, my payments, and my insurance. I wouldn't have it any other way. I hope she was proud of my independence with the car thing.

She was always the loud one of the family. Insulted people without blinking an eye or even sometimes realizing she was doing it. She was obnoxious at times. Embarrassing others. She cackled when she laughed. She cooked with lard. She was a very good cook. She dyed her hair jet black. She always wore the strangest things. Lots of polyester. She loved costume jewelry and red lipstick. She was a party girl in her day. She has been married five or six times, twice to my late Great Grandfather with a husband in between, I think. She is a perfectionist, a clean freak. If she doesn't think your house is clean enough she will just clean it for you, whether you are there or not. She has to keep up with the Joneses. She always drove a silver Cadillac. It looked like it had never been out of the show room. Tissue box in the back and it smelled of roses or something equally perfumey. So did her bathroom. Every once in awhile I will be in a place that smells like her bathroom. Even Terry knows the smell. It smells like little rose shaped decorator soaps. I miss that smell.

She has to have the nicest everything. She had a framed portrait of JFK on her wall. She had a print of a little girl with blonde curly hair and a red coat holding a black puppy on her wall. She liked colored glass everything. She had butterscotch candies in one of the many glass bowls with a lid on the right end of her coffee table. After dinner mints like you have at baby showers in another. Her basement was as clean as her house. If you stayed the night with her she washed your outfit in her washer even if there wasn't anything else to wash with it.

She used to call our house everyday and ask a lot of nosey questions. She has to know everyone's business. She snoops. She is now old and cannot drive over to families' houses to snoop around and tell people how they should be conducting their lives. I used to find it annoying. Now I miss it. I miss her calling me Gwennie and talking about her great adventure driving to Utah in her Winnebago to bring my pregnant stranded mother and me home from what she assumed was the depths of hell that was our life there.

Yes, my father dragged us out there and then abandoned us for months straight. Yes, he came back occasionally to beat the shit out of her and destroy the place. It was the first memory I have of seeing my father with other women. It was very scary at times. However, it wasn't the worst thing that could have happened to me. Believe me, it wasn't. Times were hard and we were sometimes very cold and very hungry but we survived. It is ironic that she feels she saved me from such horrible things when in actuality she brought me back to a much more horrible life.

I turned five on the drive home from Utah. We had driven to Arizona to visit distant family of some sort. I nearly drowned in a pool. I walked off into it after a floating boat raft. Some lady, a distant aunt or something, jumped in fully clothed to drag me up from the bottom. It must have been a sign. My mother should have bought a greyhound ticket and went right back to Salt Lake City and stayed there. Grandma Elizabeth's quest to bring us home started a whole new set of hardship in my life.

It was one of the worst experiences of my life driving home in that camper with half of my maternal family. I could never tell her that. In her mind it was one of the most noble things she ever did. I could not tell her that her oldest son, my mother's father, molested me during the trip home and that it was one of my first memories of a very long strand of horrific memories. I couldn't tell her that whenever I looked at the picture of me sitting at the table in the camper with a pad of paper and a pen, wearing my red white and blue gingham sundress with matching bloomers only brings back the memory of being molested that very day.

Her grand mission to rescue us from poverty and the years of my childhood after that ultimately rendered her yet another casualty of my life. I wonder what she would think of coming to "take us home" now if she knew. I will most likely never see her alive again. Funny how cooking oatmeal affects me. No wonder I don't make it very often but I love it so much.

Just the other day I was commenting to a friend about how much of that bad stuff I have let go of in the last year. I am not so sure if that was as true as I want to believe. I do try not to dwell on it though. A year ago I would have gotten very mad at myself for letting those memories come back up and would have felt even more angry at people. Now I just am a little sad and thought to myself that if there is any truth to the theory of reincarnation, that I hope I get a better shot at childhood next time.

Posted by gwendolyn on February 17, 2004 at 04:04 PM